


Wash Away What's Past

by ronqueesha



Series: My Warrior [3]
Category: Mass Effect, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: F/F, Family, Fluff, Memories, Rain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-04
Updated: 2016-11-04
Packaged: 2018-08-29 02:24:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8471923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ronqueesha/pseuds/ronqueesha
Summary: Several years after surviving the horrors of the Reaper war, Commander Shepard looks up.





	

**Author's Note:**

> If you're familiar with my writings on this site, you'll know that I don't particularly do short and sweet flings of happiness. Call it a character flaw or maybe an artistic style, but no one should be confined to writing just one kind of thing over and over. So here's my attempt at something relatively plotless, short, sweet, and hopefully fulfilling. It's part of my canon Femshep and Liara universe, staring with "Rest Now, My Warrior". Read that first if you want a bigger understanding of where these characters are coming from. Then read the ongoing fic "Something Finer and Nobler" to see where they're going.
> 
> This is also part of the MeFlashFanWorks thing on tumblr, where the November theme is "rain".

For most of Jane Shepard’s life, she dared not look up. The Reds preached that people like her, gutter trash with no future, had no business in the sky, much less in outer space. A homeless little girl who stared upward would never survive. The Alliance military taught her that, as a marine, her focus had to remain on the ground. Let the pilots handle the skies, they trained her to kill enemies in front of her, and to live down the barrel of a gun. A marine with her head in the clouds was nothing more than a walking target. After the war, and after the world ended, she told herself to look down. She had been scarred and crippled by the Reapers, and felt that she no longer had the privilege of looking upward. Commander Shepard no longer deserved her place among the stars. She let the rain pour on her head to mask the tears that fell from her eyes.

But those days were done now.

Shepard held her head up, heedless of the people around her, and let the cool drops of water splash onto her scarred and freckled skin. Emerald eyes squeezed shut, she focused on the immediate feeling of cold that came from each drop as they hit her cheeks, her nose, her forehead, and chin. The moisture became tiny rivers that flowed down her scars and wrinkles, coating her skin with a sheen that sent a wonderful shiver down her spine.

After a moment, Jane let her eyes flutter open, heedless of the few drops that managed to sneak past her lashes. The sky above was a mottle of dark and light, heavy and black clouds interspersed with tiny fluffs of white that hovered below, almost tantalizingly within reach. In the recent past, all the clouds looked the same to her. In those bleak days when she told herself to never look up, she imagined they were all the same oppressive and suffocating shade of grey, hanging over the world as it mourned the countless dead left behind by the Reapers. But now she saw them with a new clarity. There were facets to the clouds, happy and sad, light and dark, cheerful and melancholy. They blended together into a beauty all their own, and she smiled as she gazed at them. They rained down like they did before, but it was no longer tears of sorrow, but joyful release.

All around, the bustle of rebuilt civilization buzzed around Jane. Skyscrapers that pierced clear through the clouds gleamed as the waters scrubbed them clean. Skycars left trails of disturbed water and thick condensation as they cut through the rainfall on the way to their destinations. And on the ground, people of all types and sizes, human and nonhuman alike, scurried around with umbrellas over their heads, jackets pulled over their necks, or sheltered by omni-tool applications. Shepard, her neck still craned to the sky, did nothing to shield herself. She felt her hair, grown long past her shoulders, begin to pull her downward as it became soaked with cold water. Her body likewise felt the same as her heavy jacket became inundated, its Asari-woven fabrics unsuited to keeping her dry in such a deluge. Her left side pulled harder than her right, since the right sleeve had been rolled and pinned up against her shoulder. She no longer had a right arm to worry about getting wet and cold.

Shepard took a step forward, and her heavy boots splashed into a puddle. She allowed her grin to widen as she relaxed her neck to look down and see where she had landed. Unlike the pools of post-rain mud and refuse she grew up in, and certainly not the ash-filled lakes that once covered the landscape following the war, the water on the paved ground below her gleamed and shone as clear as crystal. As soon as her boots stopped making ripples in the centimeter-deep little pool, she could see the tiny cracks and imperfections of the concrete as if she stood on air. Her reflection stared back up as Jane moved her eyes upward again, just to make sure no one bumped into her as they walked about. Her smile, unmarred by scars or sorrows, looked back at her.

To her right, a handful of trees arranged on a tiny patch of fresh soil and well-kept grass, a mini-park grown in the middle of urban splendor, rustled and hummed as the water fell onto innumerable leaves and the thick trunks of the plants. Jane had rarely heard the natural song of rain pouring onto plants in her youth. The city she grew up in had been a blight of decay and poor maintenance, like many on the North American continent. Following the war, it had been mandated that every rebuilt city on Earth contain open construction, full of parks and natural growth to combat centuries of ecological damage. Humans lived in towers made of state-of-the-art materials, rising into the sky higher and higher, leaving the ground itself to return to a mostly natural state. Healing the world, just like its people were healing from the worst disaster in galactic history.

Shepard stepped out of the puddle and walked closer to the grass. Not only was the sound a pleasant hint of strangeness to her, but the smell of the rain hitting the grass and dirt stirred new emotions within her. That heavy earthy aroma that came from thousands of tiny impacts that never occurred anywhere else. Petrichor, as the nerds might call it. Every world smelled different, especially when it was inundated by rainfall. As a hardened marine who had visited dozens of alien planets, she could recall how each one responded to her nose. Surk’kesh stank of controlled rot, as its heavy jungles were maintained by constant compost and ecological maintenance. Thessia had a twinge of ozone in its atmosphere that overpowered everything. When it rained on that planet, and it rained a lot, it smelled electric and cold. Even the citadel, with its artificial environments, had an aura of sterility that reminded Jane of cleaning fluid. None of them smelled like Earth.

Just that simple aroma of clean dirt, cut grass and wet tree bark, combined with a distant hint of roasting coffee from a shop a hundred meters behind her, had become the smell of home. It was where she belonged. Growing up, home reeked of mold and neglect. Then she had grown accustomed to the blank nothingness of recycled space vessel air and the aforementioned sterility of alien environments. Earth was unique and it was hers.

Jane bent her neck backward again, but just so she could let her soaked hair fall back once more. The cold rain fell on her cheeks again, banishing some of the heat that rose from her skin. It felt so clean. A rebirth from everything she had known in the past. She let the rain wash many of her old memories away. They no longer mattered.

“There you are!” A winded, breathy voice came from behind Shepard. A moment later, the feelings, sounds and even the smell of the rain disappeared. The sudden rush of dry air felt like a furnace around Jane’s face and the sudden lack of the pitter-patter of raindrops against her coat roared like a silent storm. A strong ozone-like smell told her what she needed to know, but her eyes confirmed it.

Where rain had once fallen freely over her body, soaking her hair, skin, and clothes to their core, it now stood blocked by a nearly invisible field of energy. A dome of faintly sparking biotics covered Jane’s head, forcing the rain to slip and fall to her feet and splat against her thick trousers like unpleasant lumps.

“We were looking all over for you.” Liara said as she approached the mini-park. Her own body stood covered by the orange glow of an omni-tool umbrella, bathing her alien skin in reddish light. The reason why she used such an extravagant amount of power on a simple device wiggled and laughed in her arms. Falani, their little bundle of blue joy, seemed quite interested in reaching out and commanding Jane’s attention.

Shepard turned and blushed at the interruption. “Sorry, I must have gotten distracted.”

“We were inside the doctor’s office for less than twenty four seconds!” Liara stammered. “I turned around and you were gone!”

Jane shrugged. “It’s raining.”

“I can see that.”

The baby laughed as she got closer to Shepard, and reached her tiny Asari hands for Shepard to lift her up. Jane looked down at Falani, her grin returned to full glory, and reached her left arm out to catch her little girl.

With an instinctive biotic leap, the tiny blue child leapt from Liara’s grasp to the human’s. The flash wasn’t very bright, nor did it leave behind the familiar ozone sting that most biotics did. A good thing, too, as even Asari babies left behind many other unpleasant odors. A half second later and Falani sat comfortably in Jane’s bent left arm, cradled in an unusual yet comfortable position. It had taken Shepard several weeks and many near-heart-attacks to figure out how to hold and balance a baby with just one hand, but she learned. Shepard always learned quickly.

“So how is our little one doing?” Jane asked as her green eyes locked with her daughter’s. Instead of a light azure gaze, the exact same emerald hue looked back at her. An extreme rarity among Asari, something Jane felt eternally proud of and grateful for.

“No idea. We need to go back and actually have the appointment we scheduled for today.”

“Judging by the way she won’t stop squirming and laughing, I’d say we have nothing to worry about.”

“I tend to agree. But I won’t stop worrying until a doctor confirms it.”

“You never stop worrying, do you, Liara?”

  
“Never. Especially when my bondmate thinks it’s okay to walk out into a rainstorm with no protection.”

The two of them turned away from the park and faced back toward civilization. One of many impossibly tall skyscrapers greeted them, its lowest floor bustling with hundreds of people. Several shops filled much of the space, their open-air storefronts gleaming and slick with rain. Somewhere not far inside, an Asari medical specialist waited for Falani’s very first checkup.


End file.
